The Direct Method

The last two decades of the nineteenth century ushered in a new age. In his The Art of Learning
and Studying Foreign Languages (1880), Francois Gouin described his "harrowing" experiences
of learning German, which helped him gain insights into the intricacies of language teaching and
learning. Living in Hamburg for one year, he attempted to master the German language by dint
of memorising a German grammar book and a list of the 248 irregular German verbs, instead of
conversing with the natives. Exulting in the security that the grounding in German grammar
offered him, he hastened to go to the University to test his knowledge. To no avail. He could not
understand a word! After his failure, he decided to memorise the German roots, but with no
success. He went so far as to memorise books, translate Goethe and Schiller, and learn by heart
30,000 words in a dictionary, only to meet with failure. Upon returning to France, Gouin
discovered that his three-year-old nephew had managed to become a chatterbox of French - a
fact that made him think that the child held the secret to learning a language. Thus, he began
observing his nephew and came to the conclusion (arrived at by another researcher a century
before him!) that language learning is a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions and
then using language to represent these conceptions. Equipped with this knowledge, he devised a
teaching method premised upon these insights. It was against this background that the Series
Method was created, which taught learners directly a "series" of connected sentences that are
easy to understand. For instance,

I stretch out my arm. I take hold of the handle. I turn the handle. I open the door. I pull the door.

Nevertheless, this approach to language learning was short-lived and, only a generation later,
gave place to the Direct Method, posited by Charles Berlitz. The basic tenet of Berlitz's method
was that second language learning is similar to first language learning. In this light, there should
be lots of oral interaction, spontaneous use of the language, no translation, and little if any
analysis of grammatical rules and syntactic structures. In short, the principles of the Direct
Method were as follows:

 Classroom instruction was conducted in the target language

 There was an inductive approach to grammar
 Only everyday vocabulary was taught
 Concrete vocabulary was taught through pictures and objects, while abstract vocabulary
was taught by association of ideas

The Direct Method enjoyed great popularity at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth but it was difficult to use, mainly because of the constraints of budget,
time, and classroom size. Yet, after a period of decline, this method has been revived, leading to
the emergence of the Audiolingual Method.